Gordan Nuhanović

In The Survival League, Gordon Nuhanović delves past Croatia’s post-war politics and focuses on the people struggling to heal old wounds and create new lives. With edgy, evocative prose, Nuhanović weaves darkly optimistic tales where nothing ever works out quite right: English lawns grow daisies instead of grass, and a romantic weekend in the mountains turns into a near-death experience.

While war casts a shadow over all the characters, Nuhanović’s use of everyday events and occurrences makes The Survival League ring true in any culture. Caffeinated punks, male pattern baldness, and Jehovah’s Witnesses are all part of the lives the characters observe or reclaim. Through Nuhanović’s natural storytelling voice, we hear the stories of survivors, not only of war, but of life and its spectrum—from the mundane to the insane.

The Survival League’s humanity is universal, but a brief history of Croatia and an author’s note about the origin of each story create a firm cultural context for the English-speaking world. The book is not only an ironic glimpse into the limits of human endurance but also a lesson in modern Croatian culture.

Already a hit in Croatia, The Survival League won the Society of Croatian Writers’ Nightingale Award and the Ivan and Josip Kozarac Award. The Croatian daily newspaper Jutarnji List even voted it one of the top five books published in 2002. With the help of the Croatia’s Ministry of Culture, Ooligan Press proudly introduces this acclaimed storyteller to the United States.

For more information: ooligan.survivalleague@pdx.edu

ISBN: 978-1-932010-06-0
5 ½” x 8 ½”, softcover
104 pages
$10.95

About the Author

Gordan Nuhanović

Born in Vinkovici, Croatia in 1968, Gordon Nuhanović worked as a war reporter during the Homeland War and is presently a journalist and literary critic in Croatia. His short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, and his short story collections in Croatian include Liga za Opstanak (The Survival League), 2002, and Bitka Za Svakog Čovjeka (Battle for Every Last Man), 2003. A book recounting Huhanović’s travels through former Soviet republics was recently released. He was also the lead vocalist in the punk rock band, Short Circuit, and founded the “Young Croatians’ Iggy Pop Preservation Group.” He continues to serve as the group’s honorary president.

Interview

Gordan Nuhanović

In an interview with Ooligan Press, Gordan Nuhanović discusses writing The Survival League and his experiences as a Croatian author and journalist:

Q: What made you decide to write The Survival League?

A: During the 1990s, I worked as a journalist and sometimes also as a war reporter. Back then, there was little value placed on good literature, since the state was at war and people were just starting to become involved in other things besides bare existence. It was only in the late 1990s that the ideas of the young, urban generation began to gain ground, when several writers had their books published. I started to write under somewhat strange circumstances, in the hospital. I ended up there as a result of total exhaustion, working nonstop on the ground in Bosnia and Croatia. While recovering, I started mulling over stories I’d apparently carried around within me for a long time but hadn’t had the time to develop. So I began to separate myself mentally from journalism and look at the world through [a] completely different, more interesting lens.

Q: Which story is your favorite? Why?

A: I don’t have any specific favorites; I love them all more or less equally, from the “First and Last Punker,” which I wrote in just a few hours, to the more complex, literarily demanding stories such as “Generation of Talented Experts” or “Barefoot Temptation.”

Q: As a punk rocker, did you have problems similar to those of the character in your first story in The Survival League?

A: It’s true that as a grade-schooler I loved punk rock and British and American New Wave. In the former Yugoslavia, this sound reached us a little later, and it was common for one record to make its rounds in the city from one record player to the next. Technologically speaking, we were in bad shape. I remember specifically one record in a punk rock collection that was so worn out that I could only hear the last song on the album, but I had still been willing to spend my allowance for an entire six months on it. The relationship we had in [the] former Yugoslavia toward punkers was strange; when they showed up in public, otherwise ordinary people became irrationally angry, and it was part of that ambience I tried to capture in my story. I had no problem with the character of my main protagonist because I assumed the identity of the waiter who didn’t really care what happened to him; I’ve met a lot of these kinds of conformists who don’t really hate but always seem to go along with the majority.

Q: What is your favorite band?

A: When I was a kid, I was crazy about Iggy Pop; he was my favorite and I tried to imitate him, although we had little news or information about him, and photographs were especially precious. I also love the Clash, New York Dolls, Ramones, Larry Martin Factory, Lou Reed, etc.

About the Translator

Julienne Buŝić

Julienne Buŝić, the translator for The Survival League and Zagreb, Exit South, was born and raised in Oregon and has lived in the Republic of Croatia since 1995. In Croatia, she worked as an adviser in the office of the President until her retirement. Currently, she is a translator, an editor, and the author of the award-winning book of memoirs, Lovers and Madmen, written during her thirteen-year incarceration in an American prison. The memoir is now in its sixth Croatian printing, and a new, expanded English language edition was released in 2006. She has been published in many literary journals, both in the United States (Verbatim, The Gobshite Quarterly) and in Croatia (The Bridge, Kolo, Tema, Aleph). She is currently working on a new book, Living Cells.

In an interview with Ooligan Press, Ms. Buŝić discussed her experiences translating The Survival League and Zagreb, Exit South and her role in bringing the books to the United States.

Q: How did you first discover the writing of Edo Popović and Gordan Nuhanović and how did you become the translator?

A: At the time, I was working on a prison literature project, the translations into Croatian of two American writers who had either published while incarcerated or after their release. Edo Popović and Gordan Nuhanović were both working as journalists covering the project, and that’s how I met both of them. I knew they were award-winning writers, but I didn’t read their work until after we actually started collaborating on the prison project.

Q: Along with being the translator, you were the impetus for bringing the books to Ooligan Press. Can you tell us how that came about and why these books were chosen?

A: I’m originally from Portland, Oregon, and while I was home for Christmas one year, I read about Ooligan Press in the daily newspaper, The Oregonian. I contacted the director, Dennis Stovall, and proposed a joint project between Croatia and Ooligan. And that’s how it all began. Dennis was a wonderful collaborator and the entire Ooligan team was incredible, enthusiastic, and full of great ideas. As for choosing the books, it was sheer chance. To Nuhanović and Popović, I also added another writer, a poet and literary theorist, Dubravka Oraić Tolić, whose work I had read and highly respected.

Q: What were your biggest challenges while translating The Survival League and Zagreb, Exit South? Was there anything about the writing of Popović and Nuhanović that you found particularly difficult to translate into English?

A: Popović’s writing style was not that difficult for me to translate, since it was basically the language I spoke transplanted to Croatia—the urban vocabulary of the 60s, actually— although the action of Edo’s book takes place in the 90s. But I had to be sure I captured the spirit of the text, the specific irony and rootlessness of the post-war generation he writes about. With Gordan, I had a little more trouble because his style is so quirky. He gives a little information, creates an image, and then you have to try to figure out exactly what has happened and why, which gives his writing a texture I find very compelling. Not that it’s inaccessible; it’s not, it’s just incredibly layered.

Q: When translating the books, did you lean toward making the text as close to standard American English as possible or did you try to leave echoes of the Croatian language?

A: I don’t think it’s possible to leave echoes of the Croatian language; after all, the translation is in the English language. What a translator does try to do, though, is duplicate in English the rhythm, sounds, and structure of the Croatian text. It’s never totally on the mark, but some translations come very close to the original text, and some can even be better, though that’s hard for some people to accept. Nabokov, for example, was renowned for his translations as well as for his own writing. Translators have to be artists too, and some, like Nabokov, are considered by others to be greater artists than the authors they’ve translated.

Q: Why should Americans read more translated literature?

A: Because otherwise, they will be insulated from the wonders of a world unknown to them. Though I would suggest that a reader shop around until he finds a translation that really speaks to him, assuming it’s a book that has been widely translated already. Many authors have been neglected because of horrible translations.

Praise

Nuhanović places a candid camera in the spaces his characters inhabit… After a certain time period, they manage to do something crazy and unexpected, the way only real people can.
— Vlatka Vorkapić, theater director

Gordon Nuhanović turns the mundane upside-down and inside-out, then gives it a few diabolical twists…and makes it seem, somehow, still more familiar. It’s time for the rest of the world to abandon its deprecating stereotypes of ‘war-torn Croatia’ and recognize the unique riches—this book among them—that the reawakening country has to offer the rest of us.
— Peter Sussman, Author of Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog

An electric, ambitious, high-energy work.
— Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Arabian Jazz and Crescent

Existential angst from a natural story-teller’s voice which captivates the reader throughout. Each story ends in black humor, like those of the German writers after World War II in which the struggle for survival and perfection of the characters is proved absurd at the end of each tale…like the end of each human beings’s life itself. Everybody loses in the end, Gordan Nuhanović tells us in these ironically uplifting stories.
— Floyd Salas, author the award-winning books Tattoo the Wicked Cross, Buffalo Nickel, and State of Emergency

Gordan Nuhanović turns the mundane upside-down and inside-out, then gives it a few diabolical twists…and makes it seem, somehow, still more familiar. It’s time for the rest of the world to abandon its deprecating stereotypes of “war-torn Croatia” and recognize the unique riches—this book among them—that that reawakening country has to offer the rest of us.
— Peter Y. Sussman, author of Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog